I made some nice bread today with a new, easy recipe, and also made a batch of snickerdoodle biscuits. I also got the chance to do some betatesting which is fun.
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A lovely dozy afternoon doing pretty much nothing.
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Woke up this morning and could barely feel my left eye rubbing against the inside of my eyelid. That’s been uncomfortable on a good day and downright painful on a bad day for so long. And tonight marks the one-week mark for my new eye wipe proto-habit. Here’s hoping this isn’t placebo and that by the time I establish it as a proper habit, my left eye feels as neutral oas my right.
Also, Alexa says the rain has started and I can hear the thunder. I don’t understand people who hate rain. It’s the only kind of weather I find tolerable this time of year and the only reprieve we get from the sun trying to fry anyone who goes outside and trying to roast me like a can of beans in a campfire in this oversized tin can I call home. Also, the only weather where I don’t have to worry about hot pavement if I go outside(if I was a conspiracy theory kind of guy, I’d swear the use of concrete and asphalt was a plot by cobblers to justify the torture devices they make)… and speaking of those horrible, terrible, no good, very bad abominations commonly known as shoes(though foot prisons seems a more apt name if you ask me), it’s been at least 18 months since I last had the misfortune to wear any(and I say at least 18 months because I can’t remember the last time I wore shoes, but I think there was at least one incident in 2022).
Also, the above posts have given me a craving for bagels with chreamcheese(and by extension, cheesecake), and pizza… sadly, my food stamps for July are already earmarked to restock my tea chest, I might need to restock Chia seeds before my SSDI comes in, and I probably need at least a five pound bag of either potatoes or brown rice to avoid running out of grains before pay day and any of the aforementioned splurges would jeopardize having enough to cover those staples.
Though thankfully, generic hard candy is still pretty cheap. Bought a $1.50 bag each of soft centered strawberry candies and lemon drops at the beginning of the month, stuffed the contents of each into a 16 oz salsa jar to keep the mice away, and roughly a week later and the strawberry jar is barely below the neck of the jar and the lemon drops only slightly lower… I think most people would describe both jars as full, though admittedly, when I first filled them, they were almost full to the point of you’d need to pack them optimally to get another candy in… name brand candy is outrageous though(a single roll of lifesavers costs as much as one of the bags of off brand candy I bought, if not more).
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My son tucked in his plushies today while scrambling off to go play. He used his light blue baby blanket to tuck in his capybara, guinea pig, and lamb plushies, which is so freaking cute.
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When he’s out at the shops, sometimes my son picks up little gifts for me- he has an allowance and a savings account, and I surreptitiously repay him back when he isn’t preoccupied with his piggy bank, but he’s a very sweet kid: he usually totes home anything pink and floral, because “I love you mommy” and “you get me cool presents too!”
He picked out a pink floral claw clip with pearlescent pink beading, a more abstract black, green and orange claw clip, a braided headband with pink floral print on black fabric, and a little orange cord hair tie tied into a bow tie with two shiny red, translucent stars arranged like cherries with the word LOVE printed on them in gold.
Very lovely surprise.
He’s seen me painting my nails a lot as of lately, and reshaping them down with the hand file- so he also grabbed three bottles of one step gel polish in metallic finishes: a warm rose gold, a warm purple, and a coral shade. Can’t decide which I’ll use!
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During a very productive afternoon, I stretched my arms and hands, as expected by a coder at work, then i stared at my hands for some time, followed by the Archimedean Yell.
why ? it’s simple and I wonder how and why don’t came in my mind when I fought how to render a description in The Portrait (and, by extension, Isekai)
extend your arm forward, put your hand, fingers together and thumb spread out, then extend the other arm forward, hand with fingers as above, superimposing the hands one over the other, close an eye (losing the sense of depth helps) and your superimposed hand, one in front of the other looks exactly as the symmetrical six-fingered raileian hand !! Finally our poor faceless, nameless PC has an earthen reference for the hands he got !! on top of it, as bonus, I can even improve the “waving hand(s) in front of the mirror” reference joke !! 
When I gain time from the IFComp work, I’ll edit appropriately the descriptions in Isekai and The Portrait 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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My drawing tablet had stopped getting the automatic updates for it’s drivers, or whatever. After uninstalling and re-installing a fresh copy, it’s gotten rid of the god-awful lag I’d been struggling against while painting for the last few months, (year?), so I had a much more enjoyable time painting this tonight.
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Had a good time putting together these little thread banners, yay! I always find it so relaxing to digitally collage. These are for the inaugural IF Review-a-thon that Tabitha is running!
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Grayson showed me a really cute little baby kitten, and I guessed it’s color pattern correctly before they checked to confirm for me, which made me really happy. I loved seeing all the cute kitties, but that one was extra special- he had a very silly name, and he was my favourite sort of kitten, a sweet little dilute calico.
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Had a good laugh about a friend of mine- he’s a professional chef, not knowing that oats and wheat were not interchangeable, catch-all terms for various grains. The meows lost their mind in wonderment and horror. Silly bo billy kitty…
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I was talking to my less-than-two-year-old son and asked him to say, “Love you, Daddy.” He said, “Love you, Mummy”. I took him into the next room to at least share the love with his mum.
“Say: Love you Mummy”
He paused. And said “love you” to his sister. And then “Love you, Daddy”.
And then refused to take any further questions.
So he’s adorable but also a troll.
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Charity collection bag came through the letterbox this morning for the first time in a couple of months. This is my favourite lazy way of getting decluttered donatable stuff out of the house as it means I don’t have to go anywhere (they come and pick the bags up in a couple of days’ time).
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today I noticed that my Disco Elysium-inspired TTRPG has been getting a bit more attention (and purchases) than before. I checked my itch.io analytics and saw it got mentioned by a popular TTRPG newsletter yesterday somehow. Only briefly, but still! It has probably the least prominence in comparison to every other game mentioned there (ex: City of Mist, Steal Away Jordan) so I dunno how they even found it?? pretty awesome though!
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My new portable media player arrived today along with the 1 terabyte microSD card I ordered because it doesn’t support full sized SD cards… and for the first time since I ditched a portable CD player in favor of a digital player, this is the first time my new player is from the same company as the old one(granted, it’s only the fourth portable media player I’ve own. Still populating the new SD card(even if the new player didn’t downgrade to microSD and had a full-sized SD slot like its predecessor, I was close to needing to upgrade from a 512GB to a 1TB card anyways). One annoyance I’ve already frun into is that the new player doesn’t recognize .ac3 files, which the old player did, and which I’m hoping a rename to .aac will fix. Also, it has the option to install some Android apps, so perhaps that will result in added functionality I actually care about(Audible is one of them, and while I’m kind of loathe to deal with a paid DRm-crippled audiobook service, it’s just not that easy to find less mainstream titles in AudioCD format. Also, back and delete are now separate buttons, so that should make some things more convenient once I’m used to the changes to the keypad layout… Plus, the firmware is actually dated this decade.
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Busy day today so looking forward to an evening of reading later.
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Renaming files from .ac3 to .aac is working so far with my new portable media player… which is kind of funny considering it’s predecessor model would only play such files correctly with the .ac3 extension. Still getting used to some of the changes in keypad, but for the most part, the new player is feeling like a worthwhile replacement. Do need to figure out how to get the DRM-crippled audiobooks I downloaded from BARD working on the new player to see if load times have improved any on that front.
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Charity van lads have just been and picked up the charity bags. Surprised myself by how much stuff I was able to donate!
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My penchant for toting around a soothing creme for bug bites has come in handy once more. Pretty agonizing to be bitten by a mosquito (twice! Unfair! I didn’t even leave the house!) given that I’m both allergic and have uh, a severe deficit of blood lately- remaining teetering on the verge of unconsciousness and losing my vision while sitting propped up by pillows and blankets, and while the flesh is both firm and weirdly incompressible from the swelling and burning like I’m holding a lighter to my skin with radiating pain shooting from the bites, (they’ve swollen up past the size of dollar coins, which is an improvement from past reactions: they have progressively gotten less dramatic over time, as a young child, it looked as if my hand has been broken, and a few years ago they would swell to the size of my palms, but I suppose more exposure has subdued the reaction in some part), at least there’s the miracle of pain relief and after bite care. Urgh. I would not survive in the woods! Or the zombie apocalypse, that’s for sure. The weather is nice and cool, and I have been feeding my new pet spider little droplets of water for relative humidity in her corner of the room and hoping she continues to eat the nasty motherfuckers.
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Had an “appointment” (precisely an Amnesty International meeting), but felt too tired to go there. That’s not positive, but I decided to not feel bad, but enjoy the relaxation for the rest of the evening. And I enjoyed and still am enjoying it very much!
Also had a nice drink (a red vitamin juice) and am listening to reggae music.
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It’s been raining all day. Makes for cool, pleasant weather, and good ambiance while writing by hand with my fountain pens. I’ve drafted about 2.2k words in a gothic horror I’ve been working on, but the simmering idea of that scifi horror I’ve had floating in the back of my head for ages keeps floating up to the surface…
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